Social Media

Who Cared About the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear? [STATS]

R2D2. A giant, papier-mache Stephen Colbert. The Roots. All three, as well as many other guests and musical performers, graced the stage of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's humongous, government-satirizing, sanity-restoring mock rally held this past Saturday in Washington, D.C.

There was a huge push from both Stewart and Colbert to include their fans and reach out through social media. I previously proclaimed that the rally, a joint event held on the National Mall, "nailed social media." Well, did it?

We got a chance to look at some of the stats from the rally and the results are pretty impressive:

Live stream: There were 570,000 live video streams of the event through ComedyCentral.com or via phones. It was one of the biggest live streaming events ever for MTV Networks. Most fans watched for an average of 37 minutes.

Sites: There were more than 800,000 visitors to rally-related sites on Saturday alone across Comedy Central Digital.

Twitter: There were more than 120,000 tweets on Saturday. Those tweets made up half of the total Twitter mentions for the rally.

Apps: Within 48 hours, fans downloaded the rally's mobile apps 117,000 times in total (iPhone and Android).

Photos: More than 35,000 photos from the rally were uploaded within the mobile apps or tagged on Flickr.

For a one day event, it's safe to say that the rally did pretty darn well. There was, however, some mild frustration at Stewart's supposed dismissal of social aggregator Reddit for its role in the rally at a press conference following the rally. On the contrary, both Colbert and Stewart thank their online community for getting behind the rally (in the works since the summer, according to Stewart) and for the incredible push the online community made towards helping Colbert's chosen charity, Donorschoose.org.

Some criticized the rally for being too extravagant or self-congratulatory, that the attempted humor of the day would overshadow or make irrelevant the real message of the rally. A fake debate between Colbert and Stewart played on the absurdities of modern politics much the same way they do on live television, but Stewart then broke away to deliver a (relatively) straight address for sanity, a "clarion call," as he put it. Even if it didn't work, at least people tuned in.

With all the hilarity and hub-bub happening onstage, what do you make of the final social media results from the day? Less than expected? More than expected? What does this say about how (and who) engages online, and what lessons can we learn from the fact that two fake pundits were willing to make a quasi-real stand against a critical divide in American politics? Join the conversation in the comments below.

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